Hamid Karzai - Tag Search

I was off the grid all day, so I'm just now getting a chance to respond to the reports that the Afghan government was negotiating with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar when he was arrested by Pakistani and U.S. intelligence.

Karzai "was very angry" when he heard that the Pakistanis had picked up Baradar with an assist from U.S. intelligence, the adviser said. Besides the ongoing talks, he said Baradar had "given a green light" to participating in a three-day peace jirga that Karzai is hosting next month.

If this report is true, it basically confirms one of the two rumors about Pakistan's motives for arresting Baradar: The ISI wants to control Taliban reconciliation talks in Afghanistan, so it's going to round up "moderate" Afghan Taliban figures who are talking directly with Karzai and replace them with "extremists" loyal to the ISI (Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, come on down).

Four explosions struck the southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Saturday night, killing at least 35 and wounding around 45, according to Al-Jazeera.

Three of the bombs appeared to be a diversion to a larger blast at a prison that had been targeted during a successful jailbreak two years ago, Reuters reported.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attacks and called them a "message" to NATO commanders who have announced an impending offensive in Kandahar this summer, similar to the just-completed operation in Marja.

David Miliband's MIT speech on Afghanistan yesterday spent a good deal of time on two issues: reconciling the Taliban with the central government in Kabul, and integrating Afghanistan into the region.

On the first point, as expected, Miliband urged Afghan president Hamid Karzai to accelerate his Taliban reintegration and reconciliation programs.

U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates deserves some credit for his fairly reasoned and non-triumphal public statements during this week's trip to Afghanistan. He warned against over-optimism in Afghanistan, stressing that there are "dark days" ahead and that the quick "clear" phase in Marja doesn't suddenly mean the war is won (or even that Operation Moshtarak is won).

In Now Zad yesterday, he commended soldiers and Marines for clearing the area of Taliban, but then said "you own it" -- and warned of a complicated path ahead.

Multiple news outlets are reporting that a NATO airstrike killed at least 5 civilians in the Uruzgan province on Sunday.

According to the New York Times, U.S. Special Forces helicopters attacked a convoy of two Land Cruisers and a pickup truck carrying 42 people. A statement released by the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan today said that the troops believed the convoy was carrying insurgents, but that when a ground force arrived, they found women and children and took them for medical treatment.

A statement from the Afghan government said that of the 27 dead, 4 were women and one was a child. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, in keeping with NATO's rapid-response public relations policy, has promptly apologized to President Hamid Karzai and explained the strike in a video released to the public and translated into Dari and Pashto.

An anonymous British diplomat -- those were the ground rules, sorry (I hate background briefings) -- says Thursday's London conference on Afghanistan will focus on three broad areas of the civilian strategy.

• "Reassurance to the Afghan people," which includes governance and economic development -- basically, quality-of-life issues;

• "Some form of outreach to the insurgency," which will include both reintegration and reconciliation;

• "A regional aspect to the future of Afghanistan," or an effort to align Afghanistan's interests with those of its neighbors, particularly Pakistan and Iran.

The anonymous diplomat stressed that the conference will not cover military strategy; he said (repeatedly) that NATO civilian leaders are confident in Gen. Stanley McChrystal's approach.

I spent a little time last night poring over the State Department's new civilian plan for Afghanistan (pdf). Evan covered the question of Taliban reconciliation last night; we'll wait to see what Afghan president Hamid Karzai unveils at next week's London conference.

The rest of the plan focuses on a wide range of goals -- everything from improving electricity production to investing in local governance to training more prosecutors. A few things jumped out at me.

As the Jan. 28 London conference on Afghanistan approaches, the government of President Hamid Karzai is playing up its ambitious new plan to lure "moderate" Taliban fighters away from the Islamist movement and toward reintegration with Afghan civil society.

But bringing the Taliban in from the cold and securing the movement's political participation is fraught with obstacles, including the potential recalcitrance of perceived hardliners such as Mullah Mohammed Omar and the need to balance the desires of various and competing power centers, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, Karzai's own government and the U.S. military.

Afghanistan's parliament adjourned today for the winter, leaving 10 seats in President Hamid Karzai's cabinet unfilled, according to the AP. Karzai has the authority to call parliament back, but he will likely leave the current ministers in place or select caretakers of his own to keep the government running until lawmakers return at the end of February.

It continues to be a rough month for Afghan president Hamid Karzai: Parliament this morning rejected 10 of 17 names on his second round of cabinet nominees, just weeks after vetoing three-quarters of his original list.

Legislators spent the week questioning nominees, and many lawmakers complained that the candidates weren't qualified for their jobs; they accused Karzai of nominating ministers to reward political supporters or boost his standing with warlords.

I was too busy yesterday to write about the new ABC/BBC poll on Afghanistan. A few things jumped out at me; first, though, everyone should read Christian Bleuer's October 2009 post on Afghanistan polling.

Survey data is always used to reaffirm existing biases -- but doubly so in a country like Afghanistan, where there is such high demand for polling data and such little supply.

With that caveat, let's look at the data.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai asked lawmakers on Monday to suspend their winter vacation so that they can vote on a new list of cabinet nominees, reported Alissa Rubin of the New York Times.

On Saturday, Afghanistan's 246-member Parliament approved just seven of Karzai's 24 nominees, rejecting the rest. Six of those approved were incumbents, including the ministers in charge of defense, interior, finance, education and agriculture, who are believed to have strong American report, Rubin reported over the weekend. However, seven of those rejected were also incumbents.

Observers interviewed by the Times are ambivalent about the political standoff, calling it both a positive sign of legislative independence and a potentially significant problem in a country that is struggling mightily to put together a responsive government.

The National has a detailed account of the deadly raid in Afghanistan's Laghman province earlier this month. NATO is still investigating, but provincial officials say the raid -- carried out by U.S. special forces -- killed 12 people.

Matt Yglesias and Spencer Ackerman have both posted some thoughts on Ann Friedman's column about the "feminist rationale" for escalating the war in Afghanistan (my criticism of her column is here).

I would add that, objectively speaking, I agree with Matt: The Karzai government is never going to position itself as a champion of women's rights. Karzai has already made some concessions to religious communities (the Shi'a personal status law), and if parts of the Taliban are integrated into a future Afghan government, Karzai could make even larger concessions.

But we can't look at this issue objectively. If we assume that a U.S. withdrawal means the Taliban will regain power -- and that escalation means the Karzai government will retain power -- then we have a comparative choice: Which government will be better for women's rights?

And the answer is clearly the latter. For all Karzai's faults -- past, present, and future -- his government is better for Afghan women than the Taliban. That's true even if he eventually folds the Taliban into some kind of national reconciliation government.

International reactions to Barack Obama's new Afghan strategy seem decidedly negative, with many concerned that the president is drawing himself deeper into a conflict with no end.

The Taliban, predictably, struck a defiant tone, saying that an increased U.S. troop presence will increase the insurgency's resolve.

After President Obama's speech at the West Point military academy wrapped up, Gregg joked that the only possible headline would be, "Obama tries to please everyone, fails." At least in part, that's certainly true. Domestically, Obama's decision to "surge" 30,000 troops to Afghanistan has earned him criticism from both the right and left.

Not only that, but we here at the Majlis found Obama's speech lacking in consideration of important regional factors that will play a big role in determining whether we succeed in Afghanistan - namely India and Iran. More on that later. First, the domestic squabbling.

Barack Obama will announce his new Afghanistan strategy at West Point at 8:00 p.m. It will be an anticlimactic announcement, because the important stuff has already leaked out. Obama will announce a roughly 34,000-troop escalation, which we already knew about; he'll reaffirm that the war is necessary to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda," which he's been saying for months; and he'll talk vaguely about "exit strategy" and "off-ramps" without offering any specifics.

The speech, in other words, will be mostly an exercise in political theater.

The U.S. military is obviously trying to spread the word about its new program to arm and fund Afghan tribal militias (dubbed the "Community Defense Initiative"). Dexter Filkins and Jon Boone have articles about it in the New York Times and the Guardian, respectively; David Ignatius, possibly our least favorite columnist, writes about it favorably in today's Washington Post.

The mostly-positive coverage overlooks one basic fact: Similar strategies have been tried before in Afghanistan -- by the British, the Soviets, the U.S. -- and they have not been successful. Not once. Trying the same strategy again is either ignorance or hubris (or both).

Remember in 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, when the military released playing cards featuring Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as the ace of spades, his sons Uday and Qusay as the ace of hearts and clubs, respectively, and a host of other Baath party apparatchiks filling out the rest of the deck?

Well here's a version that the Obama administration would probably prefer not to see - a slideshow, put together by Foreign Policy, of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's cronies.

The whole gang's here, from brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, a reputed opium kingpin, to Karim Khalili, one of Hamid Karzai's two vice presidents and a former anti-Taliban militia leader whose soldiers, according to Human Rights Watch in 2003, continued to "rape, kidnap, and forcibly recruit."

Hamid Karzai, the newly re-elected president of Afghanistan, has become increasingly cut off from the world and is largely confined to his palace, surrounded by dozens of guards, snipers and personal tasters, while his daily exercise is limited to a walled garden that is home to two baby deer.

That's the depressing picture painted by Christina Lamb, the Washington bureau chief of the Sunday Times and a longtime Afghanistan and Pakistan reporter who was Karzai's neighbor in Peshawar in the 1980s and still maintains a friendship with the beleaguered Afghan head of state.